Outside Punk Hazard, explosions split the sky.
On this dead, silent science island, an admiral, a member of the Five Elders, CP0 agents, Marine vice admirals, and the monsters of the Eclipse Pirates had collided in full-scale battle. The air itself seemed ready to tear apart.
On the right flank.
Leona caught the CP0 agent's thrust with White Night. The sparks of clashing steel hadn't even faded before the agent vanished from her sight.
Left.
Without turning her head, Leona swung Meteor like a shield. A blurry shape bounced off the heavy blade with a sharp clang, but the impact was feather-light. He had already kicked off the recoil toward a new angle.
Right.
White Night swept up, deflecting another strike. Then another from behind. Then above, at her ribs. The agent's attacks poured in from every direction, a storm with no gaps.
"What's wrong, swordswoman? Can't your eyes keep up?"
The agent's voice came from everywhere at once, laced with mockery. His silhouette refracted around her, so fast her eyes could only catch shattered afterimages.
Leona didn't answer. Her cat pupils contracted to razor-thin slits. One blade in each hand, White Night guarding her vitals, Meteor sealing off retreat. The two swords wove an iron wall around her, impenetrable.
But her frown deepened. She could defend. She couldn't find an opening to strike back. He was too fast. Every time their blades met, he was already ricocheting away, a swallow cutting through a hurricane.
"Mass Execution."
Leona stomped, shattering the ground beneath her. For hundreds of meters, rubble, steel plates, even the earth itself lost gravity, becoming a dense, suspended kill zone. Under her control, it all spun in a frenzy of grinding death.
The agent's rhythm finally broke.
Forced to split his focus dodging the metal fragments screaming in from all sides, his attack frequency dropped, visibly.
"You think this can stop me?"
The agent snorted coldly. His foot speed surged again. His figure folded through the debris field at impossible angles, slipping between two colliding steel plates by a hair's breadth, blade already driving toward Leona's face.
Clang.
White Night blocked. The agent bounced away, landed on a floating fragment, and shot back.
Clang-clang-clang-clang-clang.
Seven strikes in succession, from seven different angles.
Leona blocked them all. But cracks spiderwebbed the ground beneath her feet. Her arms were going numb. Her breathing had gone heavy.
And the white silhouette kept circling, high-speed, a shark scenting blood.
"Your defense is flawless," the agent's voice came from the left, blade following. "But you can't catch me. No matter how wide your Devil Fruit's range, it can't match my speed."
Clang.
Leona knocked his blade aside again. A cold smile tugged at her lips.
"And you can't break through my guard. You're fast. But speed that can't beat my blades is useless."
The agent went silent for a beat.
Then his figure blurred again.
A new round began in that silence. Blades. Debris. Sparks. Neither could push past the other's limit. Neither could break away to reinforce another fight.
This duel of speed against gravity had devolved into a war of attrition.
Meanwhile, on another stretch of the battlefield, the situation had spiraled into pure, chaotic brawling.
Five Marine vice admirals and two CP0 agents had tried to advance in coordination. The four Eclipse monsters gave them no chance to regroup.
Shark hit first. The Samehada on his back, he threw a punch that erupted into a raging water cyclone, swallowing a vice admiral who had tried to flank them.
Before he could press the attack, the two CP0 agents struck from both sides. Shigan. Their finger-spears, cold and precise, drove straight for his lower back.
"Pressure Cannon."
A paw-shaped air bomb landed exactly at the agents' feet, blasting them backward.
Kuma stood at the battlefield's edge, right palm still extended from the shot. His left palm had already swatted a Marine officer creeping toward the medical bay, launching him dozens of meters away. Kuma had no fixed opponent. The entire battlefield was within his range.
"Hahahaha! More! Give me more!"
Urouge had swollen into a five-meter muscle giant, tanking two vice admirals' slashes head-on. He swung the Gravity Vajra Pestle in wild, crushing arcs. He didn't care how many wounds opened on his body. The more damage he took, the more monstrous his strength became.
A vice admiral's sword bit into his shoulder. The blade bent. A heartbeat later, surging muscle launched both man and weapon flying.
"The left side is mine!"
Overhead, Jeno rocketed on foot jets, the deep blue of his Poneglyph armor gleaming cold in the sun. Both his shoulder plates flipped open, revealing two dense racks of micro-missile pods.
A dozen heat-seeking missiles screamed from the pods, white contrails twisting through the air in eerie arcs, forcing the vice admirals to scatter. The occasional stray shot glanced off his armor without leaving a scratch.
The field had become a roaring meat grinder.
Laser beams, high-pressure water cannons, paw-shaped shockwaves, and the slashes and Shigan of Marine officers churned together. Every collision bloomed with explosions and smoke. No one could overwhelm the other. No one could retreat from this hellscape.
But at the battlefield's center.
The true stage, belonging to an admiral and a monster, was just hitting its boiling point.
"Ama no Murakumo!"
Kizaru's light blade traced a blinding gold arc through the air, forcing Sabo's Flame Dragon Staff back with one swing.
"Oooo my. You two brats have grown a bit more than I expected these past six months."
Kizaru adjusted his sunglasses, regarding Sabo and Enel as they boxed him in from left and right. The laziness in his voice had finally thinned.
Last time, at Sabaody, that brat Ace had used the Dark-Dark Fruit to strip his abilities and hit him with a point-blank internal blast. He hadn't forgotten that lesson.
But today, facing two opponents who couldn't suppress his elementalization, he had absolute composure.
"Thunder God: Two Hundred Million Volt Thunder Dragon Bite!"
Enel thrust his thunder staff. A thick lightning dragon, jaws gaping wide, crashed down toward Kizaru's head.
At the same moment, Sabo moved.
"Inferno Blast: Dragon's Breath!"
Sabo closed the distance in a blur, stepping through the air. The Flame Dragon Staff's tip transformed into a dragon's head. The azure plasma breath it spat out formed a perfect cross-shaped kill net with the thunder descending from above.
"How terrifying. Speed and power both up by more than a few notches."
Kizaru's lips barely moved. His body dissolved into countless light particles and scattered.
"He's reforming fifteen meters to your right rear! Sabo!"
Enel's eyes flared with piercing blue light. His Observation Haki, sharpened by the serum, had begun brushing the threshold of future sight. He locked onto Kizaru's reformation point with precision.
"Got it!"
Sabo didn't need to look. The Flame Dragon Staff extended in an instant, its pink dragon head whipping around like a living thing, sheathed in Armament Haki, lunging straight for the leg Kizaru's body was just condensing into form.
Boom.
Light-speed kick met Haki-clad dragon head.
Sabo rode the recoil, his body rocketing in like a cannonball. He was right in front of Kizaru now. Both hands coated in jet-black Ryuo.
"Four Gods: Dragon's Claw!"
Faced with Sabo's Ryuo claws, the kind that could tear steel apart, Kizaru didn't dodge.
He crossed his arms before his chest. High-grade Armament Haki erupted outward, forming an unbreakable barrier wall.
Boom.
Sabo's Dragon's Claw clamped down on Kizaru's defensive wall. Two apex Armament forces ground against each other in midair, black lightning shrieking from the friction.
"Not just lightning and flame. Even that strange weapon coordinates with you now?"
Kizaru stared at Sabo, close enough to touch. A cold light flickered in his eyes.
"Pushing this old man to use such a heavy defense. As a pirate, you've more than earned your name on these seas, Sabo-kun."
"But it seems you've forgotten. I am still an admiral."
Blinding cross-shaped gold light suddenly converged at Kizaru's fingertips. A suffocating aura of annihilation locked onto Sabo's heart.
"Yasakani no Magatama. Zero distance."
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